Now that the verdict’s been handed down and the face palming, for the most part, is over the hard questions linger. Chief among them: How did we get here? How did a man manage to profile a 17 year-old neighborhood kid and then kill him without any legal consequences?

Ta-Nehisi Coates I think has the best answer. Frankly it’s a good one because it mirrors my own thinking and I have a blog. This has to do with the manner in which Stand Your Ground has polluted the legal environment.

Effectively, I can bait you into a fight and if I start losing I can can legally kill you, provided I “believe” myself to be subject to “great bodily harm.” It is then the state’s job to prove — beyond a reasonable doubt — that I either did not actually fear for my life, or my fear was unreasonable.

And how in the world does the state prove that? With difficulty. A psychic, maybe. Unless of course there are some terrific eyewitnesses. The best witness, really, being the – oh right he’s dead. A seance? Stand Your Ground legal reasoning happens to construct murder trials that are meant to be won. You might remember this the next time you get into a nasty fight. Remain calm, murder the other guy. Tell the police very little, and you should come out alright.

The George Zimmerman case was forced to court from day one when President Obama interjected himself in it . . Then came the race-baiters Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and the New Black Panther Party proclaiming Zimmerman killed Trayvon because he was black. What about the evidence?

Naw, there was never a legal case here. No one even cared about this one little killing until the New Black Panthers got involved. I lay the blame for this fiasco at their dusky feet.

Like the racially-charged sham prosecution of the Duke lacrosse team, the racially charged prosecution of George Zimmerman was partly triggered by the threats of Malik Zulu Shabazz, the head of the racist and anti-Semitic New Black Panther Party.

Satanizing the miniscule Panther group happens to be J. Christian Adams’ life calling.

Shabazz is also the same defendant that Attorney General Eric Holder and his Justice Department cut loose from the voter intimidation case of United States v. New Black Panther Party, a case I prosecuted . .

After Trayvon Martin was killed, Shabazz took his act on the road to Sanford, Florida.

There, Shabazz used threats of mob violence, as he did in Durham, North Carolina, to cause Sanford law enforcement to tremble and to act.

The hands of the Sanford police department shook so badly they couldn’t even fill out the paperwork on Zimmerman’s indictment. Couldn’t even close the door on his cell. It took a Florida State Attorney, and a few Xanax, before George could be charged and brought to trial. The Nuge:

The race-baiting industry saw an opportunity to further the racist careers of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, the Black Panthers, President Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder, et al, who then swept down on the Florida community refusing to admit that the 17-year-old dope smoking, racist gangsta wannabe Trayvon Martin was at all responsible for his bad decisions and standard modus operendi of always taking the violent route.

Don’t snark at Ted because he can’t spell ‘operandi’. Cat Scratch Fever goes from ‘A’ to ‘B’ to ‘C’ and that’s as far as it gets. The gobbledygook is a phrase of Latin, and please remember: there are no italics in Kick Ass Guitar.

With an obvious racist chip on his shoulder, referencing the neighborhood watch guy as a “creepy ass cracker” to his fellow racist female friend who admitted under oath that that is how non-blacks are referred to normally in their circles, Trayvon had no reason not to attack, because it was the standard thug thing to do.

Yes, thugs, with ‘their circles’ and ‘things’. Which brings us right back to today:

Roslyn Brock from the NAACP—who by the way, at their meeting this morning, the chatter at breakfast is there’s now 100,000 signatures on the DOJ petition. Well, the petition’s great for raising the roof, if you will, on what they want.

But in reality – where is the Justice Department and their actions on this? . . They have a conflict now. Their Community Relations Unit…went down there and spent money, taxpayer dollars, to fund rallies or facilitate rallies against Zimmerman. That’s picking a side.

Tea Party radio guy David Webb riffing post-acquittal. He’s talking about the possibility of a civil rights case being brought against Zimmerman, as well as referencing a debunked anti-Zimmerman conspiracy theory. They fit together nicely, don’t they?

Now the DOJ should really be looking inside and saying, “Are we doing the right thing?” Will Holder do that? I doubt it. Let’s see how he acts with the New Black Panther Party on this.

Clearly Roger is not on vacation. Or lost in a bedroom closet or gaming The Halo or anything else because he isn’t wasting any time.

Forget the over-zealous prosecutors and the repellent state attorney Angela Corey (who should be immediately disbarred or, my wife said sarcastically, elevated to director of Homeland Security) and even the unfortunate Trayvon Martin family (although it is certainly hard to forget them — they have our profound sympathies), the true loser at the Zimmerman trial was Barack Obama.

Franklin Roosevelt took a major hit too but Roger is a mensch and won’t mention it.

By injecting himself in a minor Florida criminal case by implying Martin could be his son, the president of the United States — a onetime law lecturer, of all things — disgraced himself and his office, made a mockery of our legal system and exacerbated racial tensions in our country, making them worse than they have been in years.

How many death threats have the Secret Service had to deal with? I’m not looking for a number, just pointing out the obvious.

This is the work of a reactionary, someone who consciously/unconsciously wants to push our nation back to the 1950s.

He is the Black Punisher. Tweaking sainted Roger’s nose. This idea would get more traction if the President weren’t hot-blooded like a turtle.

I would imagine, when you’re hired on as a National Review racist, that you’re expected to do better than this. The desk comes with expectations. There are co-workers to consider, and an East Coast Klavern legacy to dignify. And if your very best efforts only result in hucking a hanging meatball our way no one is going to feel satisfied:

Deportation has become a near-taboo word. Yet the Boston bombings inevitably rekindle old questions about the way the U.S. admits, and at times deports, foreign nationals.

Despite the Obama administration’s politically driven and cyclical claims of deporting either a lot more or a lot fewer non-citizens, no one knows how many are really being sent home — for a variety of reasons.

That’s the photo above the column. No, it isn’t really that size, it’s much bigger. Hanson also asked the graphics department to render Tsarneav’s nose so that it nudged old dowagers in the asscrack as they doddered by.

Say Victor? This is what you’re going with? No one knows how many Boogaloos get deported from the United States? Eek! I myself bothered to look into that horror. Turns out the government keeps tabs on such things.

Although President Obama supports setting a path to citizenship for many illegal immigrants, his administration deported a record 1.5 million of them in his first term.

In addition, the released by the government in recent days show that an unprecedented 409,849 people were deported for the fiscal year that ended Sept. 30.

All-time highs. After you began so promisingly with the Menacing Terrorist.

And how does one define deportation? If someone from Latin America is detained by authorities an hour after illegally crossing the border and sent back, does he count as “apprehended” or “deported”?

Just what does “deport” mean? At what point does it apply? This is the sophistication a game of Jenga would rise to if it were played with shims.

If a terrorist climbs over a border fence and lands in Arizona, I’d say he’s in America. If you’d like to send him home, the word is appropriate: He’ll be “deported.” K? This, btw, typically occurs only after he’s been “apprehended.” But feel free to fly him back to Jalisco employing a helicopter and a grappling hook if that’s your thing.

President Obama’s own aunt, Zeituni Onyango, not only broke immigration law by overstaying her tourist visa but also compounded that violation by illegally receiving state assistance as a resident of public housing. Only after Obama was elected president was his aunt finally granted political asylum on the grounds that she would be unsafe in her native Kenya.

Right about here I assume Victor spits on the ground. Fffew. So she’s likely to get kidnapped and ransomed, for nothing, and then killed as a result of some far-flung family association. Is that a reason to rescue her? She tried to . . stay in America. And she lived in . . public housing. What else do you need to know?

10 days left. Smart sophisticated people look at the polls and think smart thoughts:

So here’s a prospect worth contemplating: What if Romney carries the popular vote, but Obama regains the presidency by winning 270 votes or more in the electoral college?

“I think it’s a 50/50 possibility — or more,” said Mark McKinnon, who was a political strategist for President George W. Bush.

“If the election were held tomorrow, it wouldn’t just be a possibility, it would be actual,” added William A. Galston, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution . .

Oh the clownery visited upon us occasionally by the electoral college. The Founding Fathers may have been funnier than how they were painted. But this, no, is not another one of those ‘excelsior the popular vote’ posts. This is cleverer than that. This is the Washington Post:

No incumbent president seeking a second term has ever won the electoral college and lost the popular vote.

Every modern president to be reelected — Dwight D. Eisenhower, Richard M. Nixon, Ronald Reagan, Clinton, George W. Bush — has gotten a bigger share of the vote in their second bid for office than their first, and with it, a chance to claim a mandate.

A win in the electoral college that is not accompanied by one in the popular vote casts a shadow over the president and his ability to govern.

Remember how George W. Bush was hamstrung by this issue in 2001? Lost to Al Gore, won the office? Dead on arrival, he was. No I don’t remember that. So it is that incumbents only can zombify our politics. Incidentally, this has never happened before so it’s a fairly sure thing.

Gosh and golly smart people. I wish Karen Tumulty had been less cerebrum-riot-y and more look-at-the-country-y when she’d written this. There’s a bigger issue pointed out by the tight polling. All anyone had to do to see it was look at the politics clearinghouse site Memeorandum today. Here is a story by the AP:

Racial attitudes have not improved in the four years since the United States elected its first black president, an Associated Press poll finds, as a slight majority of Americans now express prejudice toward blacks whether they recognize those feelings or not . .

In all, 51 percent of Americans now express explicit anti-black attitudes, compared with 48 percent in a similar 2008 survey. When measured by an implicit racial attitudes test, the number of Americans with anti-black sentiments jumped to 56 percent, up from 49 percent during the last presidential election. In both tests, the share of Americans expressing pro-black attitudes fell . .

The AP surveys were conducted with researchers from Stanford University, the University of Michigan and NORC at the University of Chicago.

Americans are more racist now than they were in 2008. Hooray! No wonder President Spearchucker can’t kill the hapless Romneybot (*click-clack* nothing can kill Romneybot *whirr* only Romneybot can kill Romneybot *click*). The polls are this close because half of the country is insane. Responding to Romney spokesman John Sununu, who accused General Colin Powell (blah person) of being Afro-racist, here’s Larry Wilkerson in an interview with Ed Schultz:

My party, unfortunately, is the bastion of those people — not all of them, but most of them — who are still basing their positions on race.

Let me just be candid: My party is full of racists. And the real reason a considerable portion of my party wants President Obama out of the White House has nothing to do with the content of his character, nothing to do with his competence as Commander in Chief and President, and everything to do with the color of his skin. And that’s despicable.

That’s Republican Colonel Larry Wilkerson, on the Republicans. Those jerks are voting more vigorously against the Black Candidate than they are for the Man Who Stood For (insert here). Mitt would win their votes as a hologram as long as he was programmed Navajo white. And then this, the creme de la ruses:

It’s the birth of Barack Obama! Probably the pranksters should not have casted Big Jim Slade in the starring role, probably. But there are explanations. We know this because someone asked:

–Well, that baby is massive. It looks like it’s at least a year old.

Babies are born heavy all the time. I see no issue with that. And I assure you, most of the general public has no idea how big infants are in Kenya.

–What?

You might think the US is a fat society, but in Kenya they are born big and then they become light. Which is evidenced by the fact that today, Obama is really light and fit. That’s just the way it is.

That makes sense. Now if he could tell us why the tad Obama keeps flicking cigarette ashes from his beard. We wonder. Why he’s wearing a houndstooth jacket and a fez, reading Kerouac and slugging a bottle of absinthe, we’re curious to know. If the fool over there—> hadn’t blown the con with his multiple production tells, he’d probably have had a million people in the streets calling for grown Obama’s resignation. Does anyone doubt that?

And it’s not like the rural rubes are the only trogs. The congressional Republicans have repeatedly called him a communist and Marxist and terrorist and death on two legs. Have opposed every proposal he brought to the table, particularly if they themselves proposed it first. Screamed “You lie!” while he tried to speak to them. Filibustered the legislation he supported more than three hundred sixty times, a record. They don’t like him? They’d like to abolish even the memory of an Obama.

Karen Tumulty should open her eyes. It’s very neat and swell to opine about a hobbled presidency on the horizon. But this one was dented by racism from the start. With polling in the swing states currently running in the President’s favor, it brings up the likelihood that Obama will win. Hence the trolls will gnash their fangs, and they’ll jam a burning cross in the wheels of Congress, again, and clever Karen will say “I told you so.”

PIERS MORGAN: Colin Powell has decided to opt for President Obama again despite apparently still being a Republican. Is it time he left the party, do you think?

JOHN SUNUNU: . . frankly, when you take a look at Colin Powell, you have to wonder whether that’s an endorsement based on issues or whether he’s got a slightly different reason for preferring President Obama.

Sununu points out that we have only Powell’s endorsement to consider, which is unfair. John thinks we might ignore his decision and turn our attention elsewhere. We might consider Colin Powell himself. I mean, who is this guy anyway? If we all had a photograph of him, or a charcoal sketch, we could “take a look at” the guy. Maybe then we would learn something.

MORGAN: What reason would that be?

SUNUNU: Well, I think that when you have somebody of your own race that you’re proud of being President of the United States — I applaud Colin for standing with him.

He’s like the President in being of a rare and different race. That’s why the General isn’t interested in foreign policy or the war in Afghanistan. He’s unconcerned with the complexities of politics and such. Can you blame him? Of course not. Like Governor Sununu, I only applaud Colin Powell for his racism. It’s okay, black people are like that.

This would not be George Will’s best column. No I don’t know of an example of his decency, column-wise. I’m just stating what must surely be fact. It’s really rotten. This is as two-faced as a WaPo editorial gets, and the sneer is poorly hidden.

As George is the grand purveyor of the perfumed pooh-pooh, perhaps it’s to be expected. He has a long history of picking up with thumb and forefinger whatever you tossed onto his plate, moderately speaking, and fairly vomiting. How this is appalling and shabby and insulting. He does not near his nose with trash. Though it fascinates him that you would be so enamored of this blackened banana peel your mongrel dog has been using for bathroom tissue. Is it true? Are you still fond of this Obama? Oh Dear.

Obama’s administration is in shambles, yet he is prospering politically. This may not, however, entirely be evidence of the irrationality of the electorate. Something more benign may be at work.

Now would be time to pull out the black ballplayer references. Let’s start with Frank and Jackie Robinson, shall we? UGH. No I didn’t see this coming. I didn’t think he had the nerve, frankly. Nobody should have this kind of nerve, excepting daytime art thieves. Frank Robinson was the first black manager hired by Major League Baseball, and he was also the first fired.

The fact that the Indians felt free to fire Robinson — who went on to have a distinguished career managing four other teams — showed that BLAH BLAH . .

Someone else around here is a first black person, I wonder who.

That Obama is African American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up.

I don’t see anything sinister, honestly. I see George Will with his baseball-love can’t transcend the existence of American racism. Nor can he erase the four years of vicious bigotry hurled at this president. By wincing at its mention, he of course reminds us of its existence. This makes him not elitist in a way to be bigoted, only to be entirely dismissive. That’s why George is tempted to crush the ants of MSNBC. And to remind us of the excitable girls with one-track minds and sensitive snoots ogling Frank Robinson. Which is not to diminish Frank, and so Frank’s diminished. George can be angry with the people who call out racists in public life, but it only makes him a divining rod for racism. What a smartypants.

Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.

George Zimmerman is under arrest, charged with second degree murder in the shooting death of Trayvon Martin, a Florida special prosecutor announced Wednesday.

Angela Corey

Zimmerman, 28, who’s been in hiding since news of Martin’s killing gained worldwide attention, turned himself in on an arrest warrant, called a capias, Special Prosecutor Angela Corey said at a news conference.

“I can tell you we did not come to this decision lightly,” Corey said in remarks broadcast live on TV and online. “We do not prosecute by public pressure or by petition. We prosecute based on the facts in any given case, as well as the laws of the state of Florida.”

I gotta tell you, this feels much better.

I look forward to hearing Zimmerman’s side of the ‘confrontation’ between him and Martin under oath. I fully expect the jury’s bullshit meter to be pegging the dial. I hear that the maximum sentence for second degree murder is life in prison. Good. Meantime, I continue to welcome the sparkling commentary, redolent of Africans!, from you law and order types . .

The occasion of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King’s birthday is a great time to reflect upon things. The greatness of the man. The lasting political power of non-violence. The struggles of people long-denied their rights. The brutality and self-righteousness of oppressors. The segments of our society still in need of King-like grace and tolerance.

But maybe you were in a silly mood Monday? So you turn on Fox News and you see, for King’s birthday, that they:

1.) Have Bernard Goldberg spend time with Bill O’Reilly.
2.) Ask the two of them to gauge the amount of Mitt Romney’s ‘whiteness.’
3.) Get Bernie to bring from home a keepsake photo of a black person.
4.) Let him brag about how racially hep he is because he spent time with Ice-T.
5.) Have Bill-O point out that Bernie’s best friend is actually Ice Cube.
6.) Make Dr. King plenty proud when Bill explains “I’m a brother, man.”

Now your day’s ruined, and you’d like to kill someone, but, darn it, you can’t do it.

On MLK day, Allen West feels it’s a good time to go after the president. What better way to celebrate a man who asked America to see beyond race than to call Obama a race-baiting opportunist? It’s perfectly fine to do that when you’re Allen.

I was born in the inner city of Atlanta in 1961, when segregation was still rife, at a time when I would have been barred from visiting the very beaches that make up part of the congressional district I so proudly represent.

. . it would be a disgrace if Mr. Holder’s comment is the first salvo in the upcoming campaign to deflect honest assessment of the President’s performance in office. This campaign must be about ideas, policy and the direction of this country, and the President must not hide behind a curtain of so-called racial bias . .

My message to President Obama is this: “Mr. President, your very presence in office demonstrates Dr. King’s dream has indeed come true. But how devastated would Dr. King be to know the Americans who are still fomenting racism at the highest levels are the very people for whom he fought for and died?”

The legitimacy of the attack is enhanced after Allen reminds everybody he’s a victim of racism. Don’t you think? Anyways, if I get West right, the president campaigning like this would be obscene:

“The people on that plantation are upset because they’ve been disregarded, disrespected and their concerns are not cared about” . .

“I’m here as the modern-day Harriet Tubman to kind of lead people on the underground railroad away from that plantation into a sense of sensibility” . .

Allen? Do you recognize yourself?

Some black leaders “are nothing more than overseers over that plantation,” West said, including Rep. Maxine Waters (D-house negro) . .

Call me over-sensitive, but I’m getting a whiff of racial politics.

“White liberals have turned over to certain leaders — ‘perceived leaders’ — in the black community like a Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, a Maxine Waters or Barbara Lee, and said, ‘pacify and keep the black community firmly behind us regardless of the failures of our social welfare policies,’” West said.

I imagine Allen will deny he’s playing the race card; conservatives can’t even do that.

I’m the threat because I’m the guy that got off their 21st-century plantation, and they cannot afford to have a strong voice such as mine out there, reverberating and resonating across this country.